The Blog Answerman

Despite having quite a few features available, the Today.com blogging platform is not without its limitations.  The good news is that there are free services available that can add all sorts of features to your blog just by signing up and adding some widget code to your blog.  Here are two of my recent favorites:

1.  Slideshare
This site allows you to add slideshows and even Microsoft PowerPoint presentations to your blog for free. Just sign up, upload and insert the embed code into your blog.  Simple!

2.  FeedBurner
It is your blog’s RSS feed on speed.  FeedBurner allows your blog’s feed to be served to thousands of new readers.  Their network is tremendous!

I have seen a common mistake among new bloggers looking for ways to increase the traffic to their web sites and it has to do with message boards.  I want to help you avoid that mistake because it can backfire on you.

The common rule of etiquette for message boards dictates that you are there to interact with people who share a common interest.  For that reason, you should avoid at all costs using any message board or forum as your own personal platform.  What I mean is that if you hit a new message forum and immediately start talking about your web site, you aren’t going to be taken seriously.

At some message forums in fact, the regulars will go so far as to subject you and your web site to a spam attack as a result of your lack of respect for their message boards.

Lesson:  Quit looking for the quick fix.  Traffic you can get with one or two clicks is worth less than traffic that comes from people who really want to read what you’ve written on a topic.

One of the toughest things about blogging is that the real world can sometimes get in the way of keeping us on task and on schedule.  What happens if a child gets sick or you have to take an unexpected trip and your blog sits dormant for a couple of days?  Not only have you missed a couple of days worth of pay but your readers will wonder why you left them high and dry.

Luckily there’s a way to ensure this doesn’t happen to you.

Continue Reading »

By now most VIPs already know that Today.com has a referral program and that you can can make some extra cash by helping other people get paid to blog. I encountered a question though that I hadn’t realized was out there: How do you see your referrals?

When you log on to your My Account page, the first thing you need to do is click on the “VIP Members”tab. When the drop-down menu appears, select “Traffic Stats” (it will look like the image on the left.)

Once the new page has loaded you will see the table below. Under “REPORT”, select “Referral Bloggers” from the drop-down menu and then click the “run report” button on the right.

This is the screen you want to see:

I’ve blanked out the details for privacy reasons, but in this screen you will have a link to the blog that was set up from your referral link, how many posts have been approved, etc. I always visit my new referrals to say hello and offer any help or moral support I can.

That’s how to find out about your Today.com referrals!

One of the easiest ways to give your blog posts some extra impact and visual appeal is through the use of images, but copyright issues should always been in the forefront of your mind when you are working online.  All too often people will steal photos and other graphics they  find online and use them without either paying for them (when required) or offering proper credit.

stock.xchng

This is one of my favorite websites for free stock photos and other graphics.  It has a fantastic selection and you are free to use them at no cost.  I do recommend crediting the image creator and while you’re at it, send them a message with a link to the blog post that uses their image.  Worst case scenario is that they’ll check out your site and give you an extra visit.

Here’s an example of how I do it:

photo credit: Rizzly

As you can see, there’s not much to it, but by naming the image creator you are giving them credit for their work (which they’ll appreciate) and showing yourself to be a responsible blogger (which your readers will appreciate).

Under no circumstances should you ever use an image (photo or otherwise) on your blog without having the proper permission to do so.  If you find an image you’d like to use, the proper netiquette is to email the creator and ask permission before you use it.

In the coming weeks I will be creating a static page here on Answerman that serves as a directory of reputable sites to find free stock photography and other images to use on your blog.  If you have any sites to suggest, please leave them as a comment to this entry.

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking website that discovers other web sites for you based on your interests.  StumbleUpon categorizes sites into one of nearly 500 topics, and serves them to visitors based on their own indicated preferences.  This enables the site to offer visitors only pages that are relevant to the topics they have chosen.

The StumbleUpon Toolbar

The StumbleUpon Toolbar is a downloadable add on to your web browser that allows them to “stumble” through web sites with a single click of their mouse.  As a user chooses the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button on the toolbar, the StumbleUpon database learns more about their interests and caters the content it sends to the viewer based on that information.  While this is useful to viewers, it also makes the StumbleUpon Toolbar exceptionally useful to the blog writer.

Once you have installed the StumbleUpon Toolbar, you can visit your own website and give it a “thumbs up”.  This will bring up a window that allows you to tag and review it by clicking on the blue thumbs up symbol which tells the database that you like it.  It will in turn send the page out to other Stumblers who have selected to view sites in the categories you have indicated that your page falls under.

This site is known to generate huge traffic bursts to specific pages within web sites that have been stumbled.  It is important to note that every individual post in a blog can and should be stumbled to receive the maximum benefit, and that the more people who stumble your pages, the more times it will appear to StumbleUpon users.  The traffic boost is immediate and it can continue infinitely.  I still receive massive traffic from pages that were stumbled weeks ago.

On average you can expect anywhere from 100 all the way into the thousands of new visitors per day depending on the topic and category of your stumbled page. Because the tagging program is limited to only five, it is best to use general category tags so that you receive the maximum amount of visits per stumbled page.  Encouraging your viewers to stumble your pages will also increase your visibility.

One final note and a word of caution:  Always tag and review your pages accurately, as to do otherwise can constitute spamming the system and it can and will backfire on you.  Other than that, the process is quite simple and you should have no trouble at all!

Best of luck using StumbleUpon to bring your web site tons of new visitors!

In yesterday’s post we talked about SEO and keywords; what they are and how to pinpoint keywords that will help you get more traffic.  Today we’re going to begin implementing some of what we learned in that post.

If you’re following along, you should have created a list of 30 high traffic keywords using the Google keyword tool I linked to yesterday.  Beginning today let’s take the first keyword in your list and craft a blog post around it.  For illustration purposes I will use my Frugal Living Today blog.

When researching keywords, the first one I used was economy.  This was the result I found using the Google tool:

As you can see, there were quite a number of searches on Google that use the term ‘economy’ in the month of September and given the current events I know that October is going to be even higher.  For that reason I am definitely going to use keywords that include the word economy in them.  It isn’t as easy as just using the word though, you have to use it in the right places and in the right amount for them to be effective.

The Title
Definitely choose a keyword that you can incorporate into the title of your blog post.  This is the first place search engines look for new content and if they find their keyword there, you have a better chance of improving your search engine ranking.

The First Paragraph, The Last Paragraph
Use the keyword again at some point in the first paragraph of your blog post and in the final paragraph of your post as often as possible, and if your post is long include it a time or two in the content itself.

The rule of thumb is that you don’t want your keyword to make up more than 2-5% of the content itself or search engines may see it as a deliberate attempt at spamming the database.  This would result in your site not being indexed at all.

If you’d like to see how I implemented my keyword on Frugal Living Today, read today’s post called “How Today’s Business Economy Could Teach Us Frugality”

SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, a term that refers to making your web site friendly to the crawlers sent out by search engine databases to locate and index new web pages.  The more SEO friendly your blog is, the more likely it is that you will find yourself ranking well in search engine results.

There are several factors that play into your search engine ranking but for our purposes we will focus on the one of the most important - keywords.

What are Keywords?
The simple explanation is that a keyword is a search term that someone might enter at Google or Yahoo!.  Let’s say for example that your web page is about frugal living.  Oh wait, I have a page about frugal living!  If I want to draw the right people to that blog I need to use keywords when I am writing my content that my audience might search for.

A fantastic tool for coming up with a list of good keywords to use is Google’s Keyword Search Tool.  Not only will this tool help you come up with some keywords you might not have considered, it will also tell you how many people have been searching for those keywords.  Obviously if given the choice between two keywords, you would want to use the one that got more traffic.

For today, let’s start by coming up with a list of 30 different keywords or key phrases that relate to your blog topic.  use the Google keyword tool I mentioned in the last paragraph and spend some time researching so that you come up with 30 good keywords that have received a good amount of traffic over the past month or so.  Tomorrow we’re going to learn more about how to use those keywords to get the maximum benefit possible.

For the next several days we are going to take an in-depth look at driving new traffic to your Today.com blog.  If you are one of those who are trying to drive more traffic to your site (and who isn’t?) here are a few tips to help you get some new unique visitors:

Once Is Never Enough
One potential mistake I see new bloggers making is that they don’t post often enough.  With the knowledge that Today.com will only pay you for one post of 100+ words per day many of you may be satisfied with just writing that amount and leaving it at that.  If you post twice a day though, you are making it more likely that the search engines will pick up your site more quickly and you’re giving the search engine more food to feed to potential visitors as well.

Keyword Usage
If you aren’t using keywords in your content then you’re missing out on an excellent opportunity to get more search engine traffic.  The search engine robots (also called ’spiders’) search your content for keywords and serve web sites up on search results pages based on those keywords.  Watch this blog for tips on making your blog more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly over the next few days.

Watch Your Word Count
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know:  While Today.com only requires you to write a post of 100 words to qualify for payment, your blog may be missing out on traffic if your post entries are less than 250 words.  Some search engines will not index a post page that has fewer unique words than that.  Let me explain:

The template of your blog contains content that is static - that’s to say that it shows up every time a page of your blog loads.  As far as a search engine is concerned, all of that is content and since it doesn’t change, they are looking for the new unique content that you add by way of your blog posts to decide whether or not it will be indexed.  The fewer words you have in your post, the less likely it is that it will be indexed.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask the Answerman!